


Fault Lines

by princessoftheworlds, uro_boros



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 11:31:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19375855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/pseuds/princessoftheworlds, https://archiveofourown.org/users/uro_boros/pseuds/uro_boros
Summary: “What happened?”And what had happened was what happened to all stories at some point. They ended. The Barnes’ moved to Indiana, to live with aunts and uncles who would and could care for the ailing George and his two children and his grieving wife. Steve and Bucky called and wrote letters but they dwindled and waned with time and lives growing apart. Bucky’s last letter hailed from a boot camp in Wisconsin, just after his nineteenth birthday. He was shipping out.





	Fault Lines

**Author's Note:**

> Find the Artist on **[Ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/works)**.  
> Find the Artist on **[Tumblr](https://princess-of-the-worlds.tumblr.com/)**.  
> Find me on **[Tumblr](https://uro-boros.tumblr.com/).**

 

\--

It’s Alexander Pierce in Fury’s office when Steve exits the elevator, because of course it is. A tendril of annoyance tickles at the back of Steve’s head. 

It’s unprofessional, he knows, but he doesn’t like Pierce. Pierce, who had soft, strong hands, an even voice, a ready and regular smile; Pierce, who had nothing about him to dislike, really. He was as innocuous as a pane of glass. Better than innocuous. Alexander Pierce, said everyone who knew him, was _good_ . He’d grown up on a farm in middle America, joined the army at eighteen, saw the death and devastation of old-fashioned American imperialism, and decided to make something _better_. Pierce was a phoenix, risen from ashes. He cared about legacy -- what legacy would he leave behind, what legacy would America leave behind? Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren killed in their homes by impersonal drone strikes, or something better, something to actually be proud of?

So, at twenty-five, Pierce had started up the Pierce Foundation, picking up America’s disillusioned soldiers returning from Iraq and Yemen and Afghanistan. He gave them homes, jobs; he was a thorn in the side of the military-industrial complex. 

And there was no doubt about it -- Pierce’s men were good men, hardworking men, drawn up from the army grunts who signed away their lives to escape broken homes and lack of opportunity; they were the kind of men Steve generally respected in the armed forces. The ones who didn’t and couldn’t know any better.

If Steve is being honest with himself, Pierce had done nothing to draw his distaste. Pierce might have had a politician’s syntax, but he also had an honest man’s work ethic. And he was effective. Wherever he went, he left stability and prosperity in his wake. That IED in Ghazni, Afghanistan? Send Pierce in, watch him and his men get to work -- in three months, a new hospital and a school for girls, paved roads and sanitation services. What did Pierce get in return? Nothing. _Not one thing_ . A glowing article in a charity magazine maybe, but no one really read it or cared, and Pierce himself would wave it off with a dismissive gesture. He wasn’t doing it for _praise._ He was only doing what was necessary to make the world a better place. Even Nick Fury respected it, and Nick Fury didn’t respect anyone, as far as Steve could tell.

But still -- something about Pierce rankles at Steve. It’s a slickness, like an oil spill. Ghazni, Kharkiv, Budapest, all places that Steve had been to once, and then returned to, only to find a world transformed. It felt too easy.

“-- do you understand, Rogers?” asks Fury, with a tone that suggests he’s aware of Steve’s wandering thoughts.

It’s sloppy of him. He’s usually more focused. “There’s a growing terror cell in Khashuri. Intel suggests most of their tools are holdovers from the Soviets, but they’ve seen larger shipments of drugs and weapons lately, some with Stark Tech logos. I’m to intercept and incapacitate the network before it settles in to deep. In and out.”

It’s hard to tell if the look Fury gives him is approving. It’s not _disapproving_ , at least, because Fury leans back in his high-backed leather chair and says, “Good,” steepling his fingers together. Sometimes, Nick Fury comes off like a Bond character more than a person, and sometimes it even seems like maybe he’s in on the joke; but the weighty air around his shoulders belies the cartoonish comparison.

So, a mission, but why Pierce? Nick preferred mission briefings snappy and quick, with no questions asked, and no unnecessary loose ends.

And, as if on cue, Pierce steps up with an expansive gesture of his hands and a charming smile. “But you forgot one part,” he nods at Nick, who cants his head back in agreement. Pierce slides forward like an oil slick. “My man will be accompanying you.”

\--

It’s summer, and it’s hot, and Bucky Barnes is bent over an old beater of a car, shirtless. In the yellow sun, he shines golden.

He’s eighteen, and skinny Steve Rogers is a bare year younger, sitting on the stoop of the old brownstone the Barnes’ have lived in for generations. If oral history is to believe, the Barnes’ are as old as the stones of the house; if written history is to be believed, they came through Ellis Island at the end of the century. He’s sipping a bottle of ice-cold water, and watching the path of one particular bead of sweat falling down the line of Bucky’s back with increasing anticipation. It’s nearly past Bucky’s waistband, and Steve, privately, wills it to slip just a bit further down.

“Make yourself useful,” says Bucky, waving an open hand behind him, which is Steve’s cue to pass him a wrench. He does, and their fingers brush together just slightly in the handoff. Maybe it was on purpose. Maybe it wasn’t.

The plan is this: fix up the car, pack their things, and head west. That’s always been the plan, for as long as either of them can remember, whispered under shared sheets during sleepovers, shouted across schoolyard playgrounds. “We’re going west, Rogers,” and, “Come on, to California, Buck.”

But two weeks later, George Barnes is diagnosed with cancer of the stomach. Winifred sells the old brownstone. Bucky sells the old car. The Barnes’ leave Brooklyn. 

Summer ends.

\--

The man Pierce sets him up with is dressed in head-to-toe black. That isn’t unusual -- but the face mask that covers nearly three-quarters of his lower face, from his nose down to his throat, in cold, cool metal is. Steve is reminded of Natasha, save for the bulk of his frame; it’s something in his movement, an easy grace and economy of motion. It’s casual lethality. He’d told Natasha that once over beers, and she’d snorted and rolled her eyes, and said, “Like you have a place to talk,” with a pointed look at his pecs. But -- that’s different. Steve is always different. He wasn’t born into this so much as made into this. 

On the flight to Bosnia, Steve thinks about sketching Pierce’s man, mostly because they have nothing to talk about. He’d tried to make conversation when they’d first met in Fury’s office, Pierce stepping away to reveal his shadow -- and how long had he been there and gone unnoticed? Fury hadn’t seem surprised by his presence, but Steve, who could hear the tiny chittering claws of rats in the drywall, hadn’t heard him. Steve’s efforts at conversation had been met by Pierce laughing and clapping Steve on the shoulder. “He’s not a big talker,” he said by way of explanation, but Steve thought, _have you ever asked him,_ and tried not to give Pierce the satisfaction of a flinch. 

He’d have to use charcoal to get it right, he realizes, studying the man’s gloomy profile. He’d packed those up years ago, when he moved from his mom’s into a tiny hospital room and signed away his rights for the off-chance that he wouldn’t always be small and hurting. When he came out, better than they expected, better than they _all_ could have hoped for, he’d left his easel and his other art supplies to gather dust in storage. If he drew now, it was with a pen, on the backs of bar napkins, in the margins of notebooks, doodles during briefings and on-the-go.

The man was just -- so different than the men Pierce usually worked with; darker, more severe, cut from the cloth that people like Natasha were cut from. 

Pierce’s non-profit took veterans and had them undo the damage they had helped cause. Pierce liked to surround himself with heroes, veterans who had proudly served and saved, who had risked life and limb in combat, and who could stand in front of cameras with the appropriate amount of earnestness about their roles in the destruction and their derision of the American government.

That wasn’t to say that this man couldn’t have been those things; except that he’s dressed in tac gear with a small army’s arsenal strapped across his broad body. It’s something about his build. Pierce’s veterans were strong men, but not imposing. The right side of rough. This man is built meanly; heavy with muscle, the only exposed parts of him a sliver of skin on the backs of his hands, and his sullen brow. His hair is shoulder length and wavy, not crew cut, and that’s what suggests to Steve that a person even exists under all that gear. Someone had made the decision, somewhere, that they preferred their hair long. It was humanizing, on someone who seemed more weapon than person.

As they descend into Bosnian airspace, though, the hair Steve is studying is pulled back and up into a practical ponytail and secured into place by black elastic that he pulls from his wrist. Steve hadn’t seen it, lost amongst all of the other black gear.

He catches Steve staring then, their eyes meeting across the jet. What meets Steve’s gaze is this: eyes almost slate in color, a cool blue-grey, and assessing him in return. The man’s head tilts as they stare at one another, and then, surprisingly, in a voice that is almost soft enough to be shy, he speaks..

“A picture will last longer.” It’s muffled by his mask, but only faintly. 

And when Steve gapes at him -- 10 hours on a plane, no words spoken _at all,_ Steve had started to think he was _mute,_ had invented a grisly and amusing story in his head to justify the silence (like one of the ones from one of Bucky’s bad horror anthologies, thinks a distant part of his brain) -- the man adds, “You’ll catch flies with your mouth open like that.” Like he’s a _schoolboy_ , and not some sort of hired muscle.

The bay doors on the shuttle open and, _woosh_ , out goes Pierce’s man, with Steve, mouth shutting with an almost audible click, trailing behind.

\--

According to the intel, the base has twenty men, give or take. Most of their equipment is old -- holdovers from the Soviets and the Gulf War. Mostly, Steve privately thinks, they seemed to be the type of upjumped men who walked around with puffed chests, bullies who only seemed bigger than that because they were the biggest fish in a small pond.

Pierce’s man seems to think that this is an easy operation, and Steve is liable to agree. The only real danger here is the presence of Stark Tech, but even that, since Tony Stark shut down the weapons component of his vast industry, is outdated at best. At worst, it’s cobbled together junk; maybe dangerous because of crossed wires, but only because of the chance of an electrical fire.

Really, this kind of operation is beneath him. He hasn’t done a mission like this since he was first out from under the knife, wobbling on his new legs like a freshly-born colt and still learning the shape of his body. Maybe once, this would have been hard. But now, Steve could handle this alone, with one hand tied behind his back. That isn’t arrogance. Steve has never been arrogant about the capabilities of his Frankensteined-body. It’s simply the truth.

Jumping rom the plane, they land seven miles away from the small warehouse where the cell Fury had marked has taken up residence. The outskirts are all beaten back grasslands, but the city gives rise on the horizon quickly, with paved roads and cars running in and out.

They make their way through a muddy sort of pseudo-darkness in silence. There are too many fuzzy, old yellow lights for it to be truly dark, the kinds of lights that kick up a low humming as they flicker on and off.

About a mile out from their target, Pierce’s man pulls away from Steve’s side and climbs up a rickety ladder set into the side of an old brick building. Steve hadn’t seen the ladder, but, he supposes, that it wasn’t his job to notice it. Pierce’s man sets himself up in his perch high outside the main warehouse with a gun nearly the length of Steve’s body. He’s providing overwatch, as Pierce and Fury had outlined nearly 20 hours ago, and he gives Steve a surprisingly jaunty wave with two fingers before they part ways from one another.

Steve doesn’t even really understand why this is a two-man job, or, if it had to be two man, why he wasn’t set up with Natasha instead. 

Why was Pierce necessary at all, he considers in between sneaking around guards, incapacitating guards, and, once, locking one in an outhouse. It didn’t settle right. Pierce liked to do his thing where everyone could see them -- where he could be noticed. All this skulking around in the dark wasn’t like him.

Then, the base gives way to an explosion of light, of heat, of sound.

\--

Pierce’s man has gone grey with ash. From his hair, to his toes, to his gun, all gray, like the cool color of his eyes. “Come on, captain,” he grunts through the ringing of Steve’s ears. Steve can taste copper on the backs of his teeth; when he sucks in a rasp of air, it burns all the way down. Around Steve, the world swims in and out of focus. He felt this once, on the Cyclone at Coney. He feels like he’s going to vomit. He’d done that at Coney, too, all over Bucky.

“Not on me, you’re not,” says Pierce’s man. A cool hand pats him roughly on the cheek. It’s the only steady thing in the world, Steve thinks, as the world proves him right and lurches ninety degrees up. 

“That’s right,” Steve hears, “focus on that. Focus on me.” So he does -- what choice does he have but to listen? He’d sketch him with charcoal; when he got home, he’d dig them out of storage, where he’d laid to rest what was left of his mother and of Bucky, where he had put away all of his childish things, packed them up with clear tape and cardboard boxes and left them to gather dust and become forgotten. 

If Steve sketched him, he’d have to make him less sharp. Less a weapon, less a knife and more of a man, like his long hair, his lighthearted salute goodbye. He’d soften the lines with the pad of his finger; he’d smudge away all of the harsh edges. The eyes, he’d have to color in. Did he even have a color for them?

His hand is clasped tightly against his side. What it lays against is warm and wet and sticky. “Hold it here,” he’s ordered, and, “keep talking.” 

He’s bleeding.

“Yes.”

Is he dying?

“Not if I can help it.”

Steve is used to dying. 

He was dying the day he was born, his lungs weak and fluid-filled, his heart’s electrical wiring all firing wrong. 

Sarah Rogers didn’t sleep for the first month he was born, because she was too scared to, she once told him. When Steve was born, he didn’t cry. He didn’t have the strength for it. Instead, he’d stared out at the world with mute, blue eyes. Sarah said he looked like he saw everything. In reality, he was half-blind, and the world was a fuzzy nothingness around him. He thinks, now, that he must have been scared. But he didn’t cry. Couldn’t cry. Steve wasn’t allowed the luxury of fear -- from the day he was born, if he had been afraid, he would have had to spend the rest of his life being afraid. That wasn’t a way to live.

And he was dying when he met Bucky at age seven, running a fever of 103 and spitting mad like an alley cat because Bucky was dragging him home after all the work Steve had done to escape it in the first place. He’d snuck out while Sarah was at work to go to school -- he’d already missed so many classes, and he’d thought, maybe if he just went for once, he’d get better. Even then, he’d known it wasn’t true, but what choice did he have? This wasn’t the way to live, laying in bed all day, useless. It was Bucky who had been sent to take him home by Mrs. McCormick -- with her huge beak of a nose -- because Sarah couldn’t get away from her shift at the hospital  in time. It was Bucky who dragged Steve, half-delirious already with a spiking fever, up the stairs of the apartment complex and put him to bed, and sat on him, all 60 pounds of him, to make Steve stay.

He’d woken up hours later, a cool washcloth on his forehead and nestled under every blanket they kept in his apartment. Sarah was asleep in her familiar vigil next to his bedside.

He was thirsty, and left her sleeping -- even then, Steve had known she worked too hard -- to wander into the kitchen for a glass of water. Sitting at his kitchen table was Bucky Barnes, with a mound of homework in front of him. He was a year older than Steve, and he’d swept his arm over the piles of papers like a particularly gracious king would over the maps of his realms. “This was easy,” he said, in a voice that brokered no argument, “I did this all last year, so I’ve caught you up, but that’s no excuse for you to not learn it yourself. I’ll teach you.” He wagged his finger when he finished.

Bucky was true to his word. He’d taught Steve so many things. Physics, and all about classic B-horror movies, the kind with bad actors in worse costumes, and how to dance, though Steve still had two left feet every time Bucky pulled him into an over-exaggerated swing. He’d been the first person Steve had ever loved. Sometimes, Steve thought, privately, he’d been the first person Bucky had ever loved too.

“What happened?”

And what had happened was what happened to all stories at some point. They ended. The Barnes’ moved to Indiana, to live with aunts and uncles who would and could care for the ailing George and his two children and his grieving wife. Steve and Bucky called and wrote letters but they dwindled and waned with time and lives growing apart. Bucky’s last letter hailed from a boot camp in Wisconsin, just after his nineteenth birthday. He was shipping out. Then, Sarah got sick. Then, Sarah died.

Then, Steve signed a waiver -- a _dozen_ waivers -- and an NDA and all but disappeared from the world. When he came back, all of his broken bits were miraculously fixed.

And in a yellow manila folder, in the basement of a building that didn’t officially exist, Nick Fury had slid a stack of records across a table to Steve and ended Bucky’s story entirely. There was a red KIA on the file of one Barnes, James Buchanan, U.S. Army Sergeant.

“I’m sorry,” he hears, and Pierce’s man sounds genuine. “You can sleep now, it’s okay.”

He's tired. It isn't hard to let himself do as the man says.

\--

When he wakes, it’s to the familiar itch of an IV in his wrist and the humming of hospital equipment. It’s been years since Steve’s been cooped up in a hospital room, but he knows, without opening his eyes, that if were to turn his head left, there would be the heart monitor, and to the right, the charts that all the doctors and nurses used to click their tongues at when they read them. 

Except, this time, when he wakes up, there’s a pop of bubblegum and a pair of muddy boots kicked up on his bed. That’s new, and much more welcome than antiseptic and a nurse’s powdered gloves.

“Hey,” Natasha raises an eyebrow at him, blowing another bubble. She looks bored, except the long, dangerous line of her casually-slouched spine is tense with anticipation. Always playing a part. “Looks like Sleeping Beauty is finally awake.”

“Natasha.” His voice sounds like gravel; somehow, it feels even worse. Hot air, he thinks, burning him from the inside out. His new body healed fast, but even then it had to have its limits, didn’t it? They never tested how far they were, or how far he could push. Could he survive smoke inhalation? Would all the dust he inhaled metastasize into something deadly in a few years?

When had Steve’s thoughts grown so dark? When he emerged from the metal tube (so like a coffin, he thinks now), healthy and hale, the world had been so full of potential and promise. When had that changed?

“You’re really lucky you’re you, you know,” she says, swinging her feet off his bed to stand. She was a ballerina once, or maybe a cat, but for now she’s returned from the field and straight to his side, like a faithful pet. The Russians had a breed of long, elegant dogs. Borzoi. Maybe that described Natasha better. Everyone else always described her wrong. “And that Yasha was there as well.”

“Yasha?”

“The man Pierce set you up with.” Natasha glances at him, and there’s something in the shadows behind her eyes that he’s never been able to work it out, but it’s a puzzle he’s grown too fond of to finish. “I’ve worked with him before. He’s efficient.” Efficient is a clipped word, tight on her tongue.

That means -- “Wetwork,” he guesses. It would make sense. It doesn’t even come as a surprise to him; he’d thought it the first time he saw Pierce’s man -- who was known as Yasha, apparently. But still. It didn’t explain why Pierce was working with him. Was he getting out? He was assigned to Steve as overwatch, dressed like a killer, and had a terrible sense of humor.

Why was he so close after the explosion? How did he get to Steve so quickly? He should have been at least a mile away, set up with his rifle. 

Steve’s head aches.

Natasha makes a sympathetic noise in the back of her throat. “We all have red in our ledgers in this line of work, Steve. You know that.” She shoots him a tight and private smile, “Except for you, maybe.”

When she leans over his bed, she smells of perfume and gun oil. He’s always liked that about her. He wants to tell her that, but his throat is too raw for more than one word replies. Natasha presses a kiss against his cheek; her lips are waxy with faint lipstick. It must leave a mark.

“Nothing’s what it seems,” she whispers against his cheek, her mouth hidden by the long fall of her red hair.

Then she’s gone, disappearing between the bodies of nurses and doctors and visiting families. She leaves nothing behind -- not even mud or the scent of metal. 

The drugs pumping through his body drag at him; it’s a relief to let them sweep him back under.

So, Steve sleeps.

\--

He sleeps fitfully and filled with dreams.

In his dreams, Bucky is perched on the branches of an apple tree. He’s plucking them, one by one, and tossing them down to the muddy earth beneath him.

Something like this happened once. They had snuck into the small garden kept by the local private school on a Saturday and gorged themselves silly on ripe peaches and red apples and sweet, summer strawberries. It wasn’t like they couldn’t have gone to the store and bought roughly the same -- but they were fifteen, and boys, and wild as the north wind, Winifred Barnes put it; as far as trouble went, this harmed no one, which was the kind of trouble Steve preferred.

Or so he said, loudly, to everyone within earshot of him, because everyone knew that was a lie. The truth was, trouble was drawn to Steve like a moth to a flame. So when trouble came knocking, it generally came with a big fist, and a gift of a black eye for Steve. By a stroke of bad luck, if trouble was drawn to him, well, so was Bucky. For all of trouble’s efforts to keep Steve down, Bucky was usually quick to pick him back up.

So, in Steve’s dreams, Bucky is in a tree. Bucky always liked to climb. He’d climb the fire escape outside Steve’s bedroom to visit when Steve was sick and locked up inside

From the tree, Bucky is tossing apples. He’s tossing them at Steve. Except the ground is littered with them, absolutely covered, so Bucky’s been doing this for hours -- no, days. Weeks. There are mouldering ones with long beige worms and other bugs crawling out of their blood red peels. 

“What are you doing?” Steve asks him. He shivers, suddenly cold, and looks down at his body. It doesn’t surprise him to be met with skinny limbs and skin so pale he can see the webwork of blue veins under it. In his dreams, he’s usually small.

Bucky looks down at him, and his eyes are slate grey under a heavy brow. He looks confused to see Steve. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he says, but he stops picking the apples and looks at the ground around Steve. “I,” Bucky looks at his hand, the apple he’s ready to pluck, and he lets go, the apple falling back into the branches with a noisy rustle of leaves. “I don’t remember. I think I was trying to find the perfect one.”

They’re all perfect, Steve thinks -- or at least the ones in the tree are still. Probably the ones on the ground were, at one point, until Bucky picked them from their branches. Bucky peers at him again, and his eyes are wide with distress when they look across the orchard.

Steve should climb the tree and get him down but -- he looks at his skinny limbs again and realizes he can’t. He never could. Bucky was always going places without him, and Steve could never save him.

“Steve,” Bucky breathes, “you gotta wake up.”

\--

When he does, Yasha is there.

It’s a shock to see him out of tac gear. It shouldn’t be -- presumably, Yasha is just a man when he’s not on mission, so his knit sweater and jeans are perfectly reasonable. A giant gray scarf has taken the place of his mask, and Steve can see the tip of his nose, a faint pink in deference to the arrival of winter. There’s also a bit of dark scruff on his cheeks. A beard, creeping its way along the planes of his face. Steve thinks, a bit delirious with whatever they’ve pumped into him, and appreciatively, there _are miles_ of planes for it to creep up. 

Yasha is casually peeling an apple with what is clearly a combat knife. When he catches Steve staring, his mouth quirks into a smirk. “Bad security,” he waves the blade lazily in the air, “it was in my shoe.”

In the lurid hospital lighting and the casual clothes, Yasha looks -- thinner, leaner, less dangerous, maybe. There are blue bruises under his eyes and a sickly, anemic cast to his skin. He looks like he could use ten hours of good sleep and three square meals. Steve almost rolls to the side of his little hospital bed to offer him some space.

He also looks, _a little_ , like Bucky. Only a little. Bucky had been tan from what felt like a perpetual summer sun made just for him, and lithe, handsome, oddly delicate. Narcissistic, like all good looking teen boys are, always trying to catch himself in a passing window to peacock at himself some, to fuss with his hair, to lick his thumb and swipe down a stubborn eyebrow. Yasha might be smaller out of tac gear, but he’s still twice Bucky’s size in sheer bulk, and several inches taller; he doesn’t look like he peacocks. 

Steve probably only thinks that they look alike because of his dream, which skirts uncomfortably close to the forefront of his mind, and because of the elephant-strength drugs they’re pumping through his body. He hasn’t thought about Bucky in years, and now he seemingly can’t stop; Steve wants to cry. He can feel the hot sting of it behind his eyes. He swallows hard around a lump in his throat.

Yasha must catch it, because his brow furrows a bit and he stands from his seat to make his way to Steve’s bedside. He settles one large hand on top of the thin blanket over Steve’s thighs. His broad fingers press up, just under where the first of several stitches on Steve’s abdomen start. There’s black dirt crusted in his nail beds. He has the hands of someone who works with them daily. “You okay?”

Steve blinks, not expecting this, and nods and wishes his body didn’t hurt so much so that he could at least have the respect of being able to curl onto his side. As it is, he isn’t able to do that.

Yasha looks at him. “I’m going to take care of you,” he murmurs in a strange tone, a faraway look in his eyes. “I promise.” From where it lays, his hand tightens, nearly imperceptible save for the fact that Steve can feel it as it happens.

“Why?” Steve croaks at him, and the words hurt, rasping through his abused throat. Yasha’s stare narrows into something pointed; something that pierces straight through him. He gives Steve an absent smile and a fond pat, like Steve’s being adorably dull. 

“Because I love you,” he says simply, like it’s obvious. Like it’s the only answer in the world.

\--

Steve leaves the hospital a week later. By the time he does, his medications have been ramped down, and his pain has ratcheted up. Pain is good, or so he’s been told; pain means healing. But Steve longs, just a little, for the easy relief of the pills he’d been on. 

It’s one of Fury’s men who picks him up -- or one of his women, to be precise. He knows it, first, by the square set of her shoulders, the no-nonsense tone; he knows it second by sheer recognition. Maria Hill. 

She picks him up and pushes him out of the hospital in the customary wheelchair they bundle him into to see him off. Steve has played this part before, in a past that is swimming rapidly closer to the present every minute. This is the only relief he gets -- the second they’re on the street, Maria makes him walk. It hurts, but Steve has been in pain before. He grits his teeth and takes steady steps and doesn’t let it show.

His pain doesn’t bother her. Her only reaction is a sharp look and an assessing nod. Her only encouragement is a firm _good_ to his efforts. Steve sees Fury in her, in the word, and the gestures.

Why her and not Natasha? Hadn’t she been deep cover?

The thing is -- Steve wasn’t picked like the rest of them. He knows that. They know that. He wonders why he’s been playing by their rules for so long. He didn’t do contract killing, espionage, or sabotage. What did Natasha say in the hospital? He has to draw it through the fog of his brain; it’s lost in the haze of drugs and healing and sleep and Yasha’s soft, matter-of-fact, _I love you._

Not everything is what it seems.

Yasha said he was going to take care of Steve; but after that odd day in the hospital, Steve has not seen him again. 

Someone had sent him. Pierce, then. Yasha was Pierce’s man. And Natasha knew him. Had worked with him before. She had worked with him _from_ her before. 

She didn’t speak of it, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. Steve didn’t pry because Natasha didn’t pry about him -- his _before_ was surrounded by as many secrets, it sometimes felt, as hers. They were like kindred spirits in that way. 

If Natasha knew him, knew Yasha, knew him well enough to describe him as efficient -- which was a compliment from her, Steve knew -- then it could only really mean one thing.

But that led to more questions: Why had Yasha been at the base so quickly? Why had he gotten to Steve so quickly, when it had blown up? He should have been farther away. He was doing overwatch. He had just met Steve. Love seemed sudden, for two sentences and Steve bleeding on him.

And why, then, was Steve set up with an _assassin_ in the first place, for a mission that didn’t, in its stated parameters, require two people? Pierce had wanted Yasha there. In the briefing, it had been explained away by Nick that Yasha was to help and asses for Pierce’s foundation; that Yasha, himself, had military training and would serve well enough with all other SHIELD agents out or assigned elsewhere. It would even make things _easier_ , Pierce had laughed. “Spare myself the time to come in later with a full crew. I trust his judgement,” he’d said.

None of it makes sense.

Why was Maria sent to get him? Last he had heard, she’d been deep in a cartel in the area around São Paulo. They’d never even worked together, beyond basic training exercises and a mandatory sensitivity course.

Why had Nick agreed to this? Nick didn’t like loose ends or sloppiness. 

When they were children, Bucky had liked Sherlock Holmes. They would lay together in Steve’s bed and he’d read it aloud to them both -- he had all of the stories, divided into two neat, hard-backed covers. Steve had liked the gilt designs on the front. 

Bucky had a different voice for every character. “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains,” Bucky had intoned, with all the graveness and seriousness of a boy whose voice had yet to drop, “however improbable, must be the truth.”

Steve thinks about that now. Maria is watching him. Their eyes meet, and she knows, as he does, that this can only end in two ways; he tenses, ready for what comes next. “Get in the car, Steve,” she sighs, holding open the door to the black SUV she’s led them to. 

“Can I trust you?” Steve asks her. Maria’s mouth smooths out from its tense purse. Her eyebrows draw together sympathetically. He’s never seen her look so kind, and so sad.

“Oh, Steve,” she sighs, “you’re still asking the wrong questions.”

\--

It’s summer, and Bucky is working on the car.

They’re going to go west -- California, and the coast, the Grand Canyon.

But Steve’s come down with a summer fever and, instead of being bent over the car, Bucky is sitting next to his bed, a hand on Steve’s thigh. Steve is meant to be asleep, but he’s only playing at it, because Bucky is -- well.

Bucky is praying. Steve didn’t even think Bucky knew how. But the more he looks, he realizes that he’s wrong, that it only looks that way through the half-shut fringe of his lashes. Bucky is folded over, nearly completely in half, so that his forehead meets with the back of his hand on Steve’s thigh, and he’s speaking real quietly.

“I’m going to take care of you,” he whispers, quiet as a churchmouse, and tender -- so tender, his voice raw and wrecked with it. It makes Steve want to cry. In that moment, he knows one truth: No one has loved him as much as Bucky loves him. Not even Sarah, who loved him with every fiber of her being. “I promise, I am, you just gotta wake up, Steve.”

He isn’t meant to hear this. Bucky has always been larger than life, but right now, by Steve’s sickbed, he seems small; smaller than even Steve. It hurts. 

It hurts because the fever is burning through him, and it hurts because Bucky is hurting. There’s a warm wetness seeping through the blanket. Bucky sniffles, pulling away to scrub his face ruddy.

Steve can’t make it better. He can’t make himself not sick.

But he can give Bucky the dignity of falling apart unnoticed. He shuts his eyes and sleeps.

\--

The SUV rocks against a pothole. A tensed muscle in Maria’s clenched jaw jumps at the impact, but apart from that, she offers no reaction.

They looped the hospital block three times before driving off in a random direction. Steve knows it’s random, because a few blocks past that point, they’d taken a few more unnecessary turns and coiled, like an ouroboros, back to where they began.

They’re being followed. Or Maria is trying to stop someone from following them.

He waits for her to talk, but she’s as silent as the grave. This is why Fury picked her, Steve realizes -- she keeps his secrets tight to her. Fury’s secrets were her secrets. 

But they weren’t Steve’s.  

“Where are we going?” he finally asks, when it becomes obvious that they’re yet again winding their way back in a sinuous curve. 

Maria meets his gaze in the rearview mirror, her lips slipping into an approximate of a smile. “You’re starting to ask the right things,” she tells him. 

That’s not an answer, and they both know it. But it’s as close as he’s going to get for the time being.

It takes them two hours to travel what Steve realizes can only be about fifteen miles from the hospital. Their destination is a left-turn into a parking garage. From there, they coil to its base -- but even that they pass through, into a long, dark tunnel hidden behind a parking spot. This tunnel circles down and down and down, so far that it feels like it might spiral forever. Steve has a wild thought in the passenger’s seat: he’s Orpheus, passing into the underworld. 

Bucky would have laughed at him. But Bucky isn’t here, and he knows Maria won’t get it, and finally, they pull to a stop.

When he steps out, he isn’t surprised to see Nick and Natasha. Maybe he should be -- but Steve pulled the wool away from his eyes sometime in the hospital and in the car here. Every strange puzzle piece starts to click. 

Nick says, in his stern and craggy voice, “We were set up. Our intel was bad. Those were civilians.”

Steve feels the words spill out on their own accord. Whatever was left inside of him had to be the truth. “Pierce had Yasha plant the explosive. I was supposed to die,” and what had he said, as Yasha pulled him from the rubble and ruin? He was always supposed to die. Steve lived in continual defiance to his fate.

At that, Nick frowns. “Alexander Pierce is a man who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Why would he kill civilians in Bosnia?” 

Natasha is the one to answer him, not Steve. “Or Budapest,” she says, smiling thinly. “Ukraine, Afghanistan.”

“He gets to clean up the mess,” Steve says. “Remake things in his image. Order, from chaos.”

“But Yasha saved you. That wasn’t in the books,” continues Natasha. “Pierce didn’t like it, but it’s what he had. We don’t know why he didn’t send someone else. By all rights, he should have. You can destroy this whole thing. This is sloppy. Pierce isn’t sloppy.”

“If Pierce was sloppy, you think I’d be in a hole in the ground like a cockroach? I was the one who was sloppy -- _trust_ ,” spits Fury, like his namesake. “This is why I don’t trust people. We’re compromised. SHIELD is implicated in all of this -- the government is implicated in this. Our saving grace is that one of our own men was injured during it all. Makes us look stupid, not evil. He doesn’t get to say that the U.S. sent in an agent to kill a bunch of defenseless people. He has to say there was a mistake.”

Steve thinks of Yasha, flipping the knife casually by his bedside. 

Of him bent over, almost in prayer. I’ll protect you, he’d said.

He swallows once; his mouth has gone dry and papery. The words get stuck, but he forces them out.

\--

Bucky liked to wear his hair short and his smiles easy. There is very little in common between him and Yasha. But now, Steve can see it -- he can superimpose the images, layer Bucky on top of Yasha, and there -- older, heavier, harder, but the little mole under his ear was still there, the stubborn cowlick. How could he have missed it?

The serum had sharpened his vision -- when he was seventeen, Steve had seen the world through a gray and fuzzy film. Bucky had been the one thing he knew every inch of, from the sliver of his fingernails, to the tiny wrinkles by his eyes. How _could_ he have missed it?

But it’s easy to miss, Steve forgives himself, when Bucky is supposed to be dead. To see him in other people would be crazy. Not that he hadn’t, in the years that passed. For years after the news of Bucky disappearing in war-torn Afghanistan, Steve had seen him in the coffee shop barista, in the cashier at the grocery store, out of the corner of his eye. But whenever Steve had turned to look again, Bucky had been gone. Like Eurydice. Eventually, Steve had stopped looking.

Across the overpass, Yasha smiles at him with great, genuine relief. “There you are,” he says happily. “I thought they’d taken you away. I was supposed to pick you up, you know. I’m always the one that does.”

“Bucky,” Steve says. He waits.

Yasha nods and agrees. “Sometimes. Sometimes James, sometimes Yasha, sometimes the Asset. I have a lot of names and a lot of faces these days. But you know me. I knew that you knew me, from the second I saw you. Even if you look different.” He sounds so happy. It’s painful. It’s the worst kind of pain, Steve thinks.

“Why are you working for Pierce?” Steve asks him, to keep on track.

“Why are you working for SHIELD?” Bucky hisses back, his placid facade dropping into a snarl. “Look what they did to you, they changed you, they put you in danger. You’re too sick, Steve, and they send you out and use you and hurt you. You could die! And for what? For them? Who are they?” 

But as quickly as it starts, it stops. Bucky shakes his head, his long hair whipping around him. He shrinks in on himself, quieter now. “It’s fine,” he mutters. “I forgive you. You were always dumb and brave. But that’s enough now, it’s time to come home.”

“You died.” Steve breathes in. Out. Looks down at his hands and has to count to ten to get out his next words. “I saw your record. I looked it up.” The red KIA -- his color blindness cured, and it felt like it was the first thing he ever saw in the entire world. How terrible it was; how many nights had he closed his eyes and seen it on the backs of his eyelids, like it had been branded there.

There is a stretch of silence between them. It feels like it goes on for miles.

Across the bridge, Bucky is dressed dangerously. 

It always ends in a fight, Steve thinks.

Plaintive, contrary to the way he’s dressed, Bucky begins to speak: “Pierce found me, and fixed me. It took awhile,” he admits, the words grudging.  “I didn’t remember until -- I saw you again.” Now, there’s contriteness in his tone of voice -- a genuine sadness, because he forgot Steve. It wasn’t his fault, but he’s apologizing. It stings. “But I remember now,” says Bucky hopefully, “and Alexander says it’s okay, we can be together, we can go west, remember? You just have to come home with me, Stevie. SHIELD is lying to you. Whatever they’ve been telling you, they’re lying.”

He believes it, Steve realizes. With every fiber of his being, Bucky believes in Pierce. 

But it was Pierce, wasn’t it, who came in after the war in Afghanistan with his smile and his helping hands? And it was Pierce who made sure every record and file recorded Bucky as dead. Dead, and gone, and for what -- so he’d have a nameless dog to do his dirty work? 

Pierce kept everything above board -- all his work, done in the light of day.

And Bucky, under it all, creating the scenes for Pierce to swoop in and fix. Pierce got from it: fame, fortune, power -- and the ability to remake things as he wanted. 

“What did he do to you?” Steve says softly. 

For a second, Bucky looks hurt by Steve’s suspicion, but it’s only for a moment. His expression hardens quickly. “You’re coming with me,” he bites the end of his words, his jaw stiff with anger. That jut, Steve knows. He knows it so well that it makes his fingers itch. He wants to press him thumb into the dimple of Bucky’s chin, like he used to do when they were children. Like he could have done, for years, if Pierce hadn’t stolen Bucky and Bucky’s future away. “It’s the only way. SHEILD has you confused. I was confused, too. Pierce fixes it, I promise. It doesn’t even have to hurt.”

“You can make me,” Steve agrees, pushing aside the growing sorrow inside of him. He has to focus. “I’m still injured,” he says, “and I wouldn’t fight you in the first place, you know that, Buck.” At that, Bucky beams at him, and that’s just an added lance of pain. But Steve knows pain. He continues despite it. He always has. “Do you really trust him? You couldn’t remember me until you saw me again. Bucky. I was supposed to die on that mission. You were supposed to kill me.”

It flickers across Bucky’s expression first. It’s so brief that Steve almost misses it but here, now, looking at Bucky again, all of the memories he has of Bucky come flooding back in stark relief. He knows all of Bucky’s tells -- and that was, for the first time, _doubt._ “No,” Bucky says slowly, “he made a mistake. He said so. He was happy when I saved you. He said we could undo what SHIELD had done.”

“Was he?” Steve pushes. It hurts him to do it, because it hurts Bucky, he can see that. Bucky flinches in response to him. Steve tries to gentle his tone, knowing it doesn’t matter, but having to, because it’s _Bucky_. “Bucky, think about this. What did he do to you? Why couldn’t you remember me? SHIELD might have -- changed me,” he admits, because they had. They had, and he had allowed it. Bucky was dead and Sarah was dead and no one was going to take care of sickly Steve Rogers the way they gladly had, their entire lives. It was change himself or die. “But I never forgot you. They never took you away from me.”

\--

In the ruinous landscape of an orchard in a dream, Bucky plucks an apple and hands it to Steve.  

On the overpass, a bullet whizzes by Steve and strikes Bucky in the gut.

He realizes: apples can be the color of blood.

\--

When Orpheus descended into the underworld to rescue his love, he made a single mistake. He crossed the threshold and turned to look behind him. He wanted to make sure she was still following. His moment of doubt was his undoing.

Steve thinks, _I shouldn't have come back. I should have let you go. It would have been kinder._

“Steve?” Bucky says, his voice reedy with pain. He presses his hand against the growing bloom of blood on his stomach and holds it up woodenly to look it over -- even with the distance between them, Steve can make out the red covering his palm and running down his wrists.

Behind Bucky, like great shadows, men appear. Steve’s seen them before though they look nothing like their past appearances, where they’d been wide-eyed and earnest on camera about the good work the Pierce Foundation did. 

Here, on the quiet overpass, there is nothing wide-eyed and earnest about them. All Steve sees is anger and hate and the dark, certain knowledge that enables the monsters in men. One passes by Bucky to grind the heel of his boot into Bucky’s side. Bucky howls with pain, trembles, and keels over. He makes a hurt whimpering noise in the back of his throat, but there isn’t a fight in him. “I did good,” Steve can make out, “I wasn’t gonna leave.”

The other keeps walking towards Steve.

This one speaks. Sit, stay, speak -- Pierce’s dogs were trained. “You ruined a good thing, you know,” he says. Steve knows him. He has a face that could be handsome, but now, it’s this: skin stretched thinly and tightly across a snarl, his skull sharp beneath it, and mean. “We’re gonna have to scramble his brains all up again. I was looking forward to having the weekend off.”

“What did you do to him?” Steve asks. He has to know. There is a poisonous pit of hate bubbling in his gut. The man must be blind because he doesn’t see it.

“What did we do to him?” he mocks Steve. “Sweetheart, we saved him. America gave a nineteen year old kid a gun and told him to go kill its enemies. Well, they didn’t tell him that its enemies wanted to kill him too. When we found him, he was naked and mumbling and only weighed a hundred pounds. Pierce gave him a choice. He could die, pathetically, for a country that left him to rot or he could help Pierce fix it. No more kids like him having to die like this.

“The pesky thing is,” he continues, “people got all of these ideas as to the type of people they are. They think they’re good. That they’re noble. People who think they’re good and noble don’t bomb mosques or kill women and children. The Jihadis had already done some of the legwork breaking him -- he couldn’t even remember his name, just his number and rank. We did the rest. And where he went, we followed, and Pierce fixed all of his messes. All you have to do is play by his rules. And his rules aren’t so bad. He was even going to allow that fucking mongrel to have you, if you kept your mouth shut and played nice. I mean, we’d have to scramble your brains too, but he seemed fine with that deal.

“Is it worth it,” asks the man, close enough that Steve can even smell his breath now, hot and rank from an early lunch, “to lose him again?”

Steve counts to ten. Bucky is whimpering on the bridge and mumbling something -- don’t hurt him, maybe, this can be fixed.

A breath is one.

There’s sweat on his upper lip and a fine tremble in his hands. When he was smaller, they used to shake all the time, and Bucky would -- well. Bucky had wide, open hands, and he liked to fix things in his spare time. He had fixed Steve, too, patched up knee scrapes and splinted fingers, worming his way slowly and assuredly into Steve’s life like he’d been there from the very start. Like they’d been born together. Two halves of a whole, they were. 

So that’s two.

And three.

“And cut,” says Natasha, all smiles and pink bubble gum popping, her thumb swiping across her phone. “That was great. Terrific job. You’re a natural in front of the camera, anyone ever tell you that...what was your name again? Rumlow? Say hi to Facebook for me, will you?”

She is glorious, the red of her hair blazing in the sunlight, and vicious and smart. It had been her plan, more than his. The phone drops from her hand and in its place is steel and heat.

\--

“He doesn’t want to hurt me,” Steve tells Nick, hours ago in an underground parking garage.

Across the table, Natasha meets his eye. She’s looking for permission. She won’t do this if he says no, but -- Steve gives it with a canting of his head. It happens so fast -- a blink, and you miss it, but Natasha has always been quick.

“We can use that,” is all she says.

\--

Steve doesn’t know what happens next. That’s how he’ll tell it later, to police officers and reporters, and even to Cabinet Secretaries, who glare at him from a raised podium when he retells it, so that the brutality is misplaced. To himself, he has to tell the truth. That’s all that’s left in him. Everything else has been poured out.

And this is what the truth looks like: His elbow crunching into Rumlow’s face isn’t misplaced, even though it strains the still healing wounds on his abdomen. The knee he plants in Rumlow’s gut isn’t misplaced. The tooth that he cracks loose isn’t misplaced.

At that, Rumlow laughs, spitting it up. His smile is bloody and feral. “You’ve got some bite,” he sneers. He doesn’t sneer long before Steve’s on him again. 

Bucky has stopped whimpering on the bridge. He’s ceased to make any noise at all. Steve has to push it from his mind and focus.

But that doesn’t mean he has to forget it entirely.

\--

What happens next is the only part that gets lost, but that’s because Steve’s popped his stitches open and the blood loss hits him hard.

He remembers this, from what little he remembers at all: the wail of sirens, the flash of cameras, the buzz of a hundred questions asked at once. This is the fallout that happens when something great crashes to the ground. Steve is lucky to spend most of it out cold.

And missed in all of this is, to everyone save Steve: Bucky, stark and skinny on an ambulance stretcher, an EMT furiously intubating him, another saying, make the call. 

\--

The healing is slower this time, and more painful, his body having to make up for too much hurt all at once. 

He doesn’t come to all at once. It’s a process. Healing is always a process. He wakes up once and there’s a nurse swabbing his cracked lips with vaseline. He wakes up again and there’s Nick Fury as a dark shadow by the window.

When he wakes up for a third time, fully, it’s to a soft press of lips against his brow.

The fourth time, Steve stays awake. Natasha is curled into the uncomfortable chair in the hospital room. She’s wearing no makeup and a big, purple sweatshirt that probably isn’t hers. There’s a cut with a delicate looking butterfly bandage through her eyebrow. It will scar, he thinks, but scars have always enhanced Natasha, not taken away anything from her.

On the table next to her are what seem to be a hundred cards and a dozen bouquet of flowers. In his head, Steve charts a quick timeline -- he’s been out long enough for a couple of the bouquets to have begun to wilt, and for some of the Get Well balloons in the corner to hang a little morosely along their ribbons.

Maybe a week, or just a bit more, he figures -- the flowers are drooping, their petals curling inward, and the sweet scent of floral decay is strong enough to pierce the overwhelming antiseptic smell of the hospital. He makes to turn his head, but his neck is braced. He doesn’t even remember that happening.

Natasha confirms his thoughts when she finally cracks an eye open and catches him awake. “Nine days,” she says primly, leaving her ungainly sprawl to sit lightly on his bed. It barely gives away under her.

He keeps looking at her, looking hard at her, until she gets his next question. It doesn’t take long -- she’s too smart, and she’s been expecting it. She takes his hand in hers; her hands are strong and rough, with callouses on the pads of her fingers. She doesn’t have fingerprints, he knows. They were burned off, in a past she doesn’t speak of. 

She takes his hand, squeezing, and mutely shakes her head in response to his unvoiced question.

Steve is past the point of dignity. When he cries, he lets her see it, in all its ugliness and its hurt. It hurts worse with the ache of his abused body, but the hurt is cathartic in its own way.

Natasha holds his hand, and lets him.

\--

The healing is slow, but the healing does happen.

You’ve always been so impatient, Bucky laughs in a memory. He’s young, beautiful, and glowing, but there are shadows under his eyes, Steve can see now. You just have to give it time. Everything happens with time.

\--

The video call comes through grainy, with a halo of snow like an old TV might have had; the audio quality is even worse, sticky with static. Every now and then it cuts completely, only to come back twice as loud on the word it picks back up on.

“I’m sorry to see you go,” Nick is saying, even as the audio does its best to distort his words. If he is, he doesn’t particularly sound it, but Steve believes him despite that. Nick wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it, though Steve might be being generous with that particular thought. Probably Nick had said many things he didn’t believe -- but probably not as many to Steve, and not about this. “You’re sure you won’t stay?” 

He’s in his new office, which has floor to ceiling windows behind him and overlooks Manhattan. His new desk is big and U-shaped and mahogany, with a giant leather chair to sit in. It is, admittedly, a very nice new office. Steve had even admired the view when he’d visited after leaving the hospital -- at sunset, it had been incredible, the sunlight flung through the great valleys caused by the skyscrapers.

All good things have a cost, of course, and this one came in its location -- it was on top of the new Stark building, and in the background of the video, Steve spots the namesake of the tower strutting around like a proud rooster. He gets a manic wave when Tony Stark catches him looking.

“Honestly,” Steve smiles at Nick, “I’ve never been one for heights. Stark Tower is just a bit too tall for me.”

Nick Fury gives him a remarkably unimpressed glower, as if Steve hadn’t gazed out of his windows at the city he grew up in wonderingly. Considering Nick’s working with one eye and a grainy video feed, it’s very stirring. Maybe that’s his superpower. 

“Funny,” Nick gives him. “Have a good life, Rogers.”

Nick doesn’t waste time with goodbyes. When he’s done, he’s done, and the call goes abruptly black. Steve sets his phone down. 

“Everything good?” Bucky asks, sitting down on the blanket in front of him. His hair is shaggy, with split ends, and he doesn’t quite meet Steve’s eye the full way, settling instead on the bridge of Steve’s nose. They’re working on those parts still. But he’s shaved, so that the rising dawn can cast light and shadow across his cheek bones with a chiaroscuro effect. He’s beautiful. 

Behind him, the sun is beginning its rise; it creeps pale pink fingers into the dark weaving of the night sky and heaves itself up across the horizon, illuminating the red and golden rock of the cliffsides and the torrid blue river cleaving the earth in two. A masterpiece, millions of years in the making.

Steve picks up his sketchbook and his charcoals. Bucky’s cheeks flare a soft blush pink; his eyes are the exact color of the wild Colorado below, which wore solid earth away from under it with time and patience. “I said,” Steve reminds him, and Bucky smiles, catching where this is going, “I wanted to draw you.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic for the Captain America Reverse Big Bang Challenge 2019, inspired by the amazing art by princess-of-the-worlds. 
> 
> This was tough -- I'm usually a short fic writer, so definitely harder to write something long, but I learned a lot doing it!
> 
> Please enjoy!


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